Cottage Country
Action comedy set in Ontario’s cottage country is funny, violent and unexpected.
Todd and Cammie are clearly in love. I almost don’t want to say anything more about Cottage Country for fear of ruining its sundry devious surprises.
Many movies feature a twist or reveal in the final act: I am your father! He’s a ghost! One Direction is not an actual direction! (Was I the only one who didn’t see that coming?) Anyway, this one bounces down the narrative highway like an out-of-control hearse late for its own funeral.
Tyler Labine and Malin Akerman play the happy couple, headed off to his family’s Muskoka retreat for a week’s vacation and (Todd hopes) an accepted marriage proposal.
But the respite comes to a record-scratching halt with the arrival of Todd’s brother, Salinger (Dan Petronijevic), and his sometimes-significant other. She’s played by Britain’s Lucy Punch with an accent like a Valley Girl who was raised in the Caucasus.
Cammie, turning ever so shrewish, demands that Todd tell Salinger to vamoose. This he does, but Salinger digs in his heels, and a scrap ensues.
At first, both men fight like girls. Then one of them lifts an axe, and the movie takes its first horrifying lurch. It’s so dreadful it’s almost funny. No, it’s so funny you can’t believe how ghastly it is. Actually, it’s both.
So now we have a dead body. Given the woodsy-cabin locale (plus the fact that mortality loves company), you can expect more to follow. Seemingly just to broaden the pool of victims, Salinger has invited all his friends up to the cottage for the weekend, and so the murder scene quickly becomes party central, complete with one reveller named Dov (Benjamin Ayres) who fancies himself an amateur sleuth.
From here, the movie lists from comedy to horror, from thriller to police procedural, from The Taming of the Shrew to Macbeth. In its best moments it touches down in Coen brothers’ country, although I may be projecting because of the presence of folksy police Sergeant Mackenzie, played by Sabrina Grdevich.
Along the way we marvel at the knowledge one can pick up at childhood bar mitzvahs, and at the ongoing use of the frying pan as a movie murder weapon of choice. (This with an axe, meat cleavers and arrows lying around for the taking.)
It all unrolls to a boppy soundtrack that includes To Your Health by Canadian Chuck Erlichman, and not one but two covers of If I Didn’t Care, by the Ink Spots (1939) and the Plat- ters (1961). Throughout, it feels as though fate plays a shadowy co-starring role. The universe seems to be messing with one of the characters, letting him (or her; don’t want to say too much) get away with things while simul- taneously dangling the threat of punishment.
If Cottage Country has a flaw, it may be that it is too many things to attract too many people. Horror fans will want more blood; comedy aficionados may find the laughs too spread out. But if you have even an inkling of appreciation for either genre, and you like the idea of a story that doesn’t tell you where it’s going in the first five minutes, tag along. It’s worth the drive.